


in one tongue, ininiikaazo

by tomato_greens



Category: The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:53:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26822461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: Millie didn’t know how to say it, to Patrice, in the public of this diner, though she’d learned some words in the past year that had begun to make things make sense to her. She wondered whether these words, or some friend of them, existed in Chippewa.
Relationships: Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau/Millie Cloud
Kudos: 3





	in one tongue, ininiikaazo

**Author's Note:**

> as in the book, Millie and Patrice belong to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, Mikinaakwajiw-ininiwag; though I’ve done my best to write thoughtfully about the characters’ experiences without overstepping, I’m not Native and there are limits to my understanding. please let me know if something doesn't sit well. 
> 
> this is a love letter to both characters, but especially to Millie Cloud, whose chapters meant a lot to me. I couldn’t bear for her to end up with Hay Stack, of _all_ people.

Pixie — no, Millie thought; _Patrice_ — wore the same wristwatch she’d been wearing since 1954, which six years later still kept its time in perfect second-by-second succession. The bearings, of course. And Pixie — _Patrice_ ; it was hard to remember, when even Wood Mountain now slipped and called her Pixie, but Millie worked as she always had to arrange her thoughts in geometrically correct precision — Patrice of course still wound it every night. Patrice wasn’t one to take things for granted. Well: neither of them were. 

“Hi, Checks,” said Patrice as she entered the diner and came over to the table. She said it in English, which she always spoke to Millie.

“Hello,” said Millie, also in English, which would always be her more comfortable tongue. She could, now, very occasionally, make Zhaanat’s mouth quirk with the beginnings of laughter when they were talking in Chippewa. Less often on purpose. Of course, she could not slip gracefully through her own thoughts in any language, not like Pixie, who darted through her entire life as Millie imagined she once had through water. Not like Patrice, that is. “It’s nice to see you.”

“Formal,” Patrice said, with a look on her face that Millie couldn’t read, but soon enough they were sipping from their coffees and had returned to the usual pattern: Millie would say something and regret it immediately, Patrice would respond, miraculously, as though Millie were not an embarrassment. Minneapolis suited Patrice, Millie thought, and so did law school, though Patrice missed her mother and Vera and the baby, who was no longer a baby.

“And Wood Mountain?” Millie couldn’t help but asking.

“You’re still talking about that?” Patrice said. The mid-afternoon yellowish light caught the frame of her eyeglasses, which were no longer the square black Indian Health frames but slightly rounder, slightly thinner. She looked different. As long as Millie had known her, wawiyazhinaagozi, as Zhaanat had taught Millie to say. Cute, yes; this was a word for Pixie. But in the new eyeglasses, she was certainly Patrice. Where had she gotten them? Millie wanted to know everything about them. “Millie,” said Patrice, in the tone of voice which meant she had said it more than once. 

“Sorry, sorry,” said Millie, sipping her coffee again to hide her agitation. 

“Well, what about Barnes? Didn’t he finally propose?” 

“If you could call it that.”

“And?” 

Millie felt Patrice’s eyes on her bare hands. “And nothing. He did a worse job asking me to marry him than he did asking me to go out for a date in the first place.”

“So you said no?”

“So I didn’t say anything,” Millie admitted, “I just ran and got out of there.” 

Patrice let out one of her little cackles of laughter. Archille, who loved to laugh, had taught her well. “Have you talked to him since?”

“N–ooo,” Millie said. “Once or twice. That was almost a year ago, though.”

“A year!” Patrice sat up and looked Millie in the face. “And you didn’t say anything!”

“You were so busy.”

“I wasn’t too busy to want to hear about you running out on Hay Stack.”

“I was embarrassed,” Millie said, which was closer to the truth. 

“Why should you be?”

But Millie didn’t know how to explain this to Patrice, who was known to be very beautiful, and who was also smarter than anyone Millie knew, certainly smarter by far than every wispy-genius Ph.D. candidate she’d ever blown past on her way to her favorite table in Walter Library. How Barnes had wanted her to give herself up, wanted her to put her dissertation on a shelf. How Barnes had wanted her to dote on him, and how she had liked the playacting, at first — wearing kitten heels, handing him a whiskey, acting womanly — until she realized he was deathly serious about it. And how he had always seemed to want her to be something other than she was: more Indian, or less. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Well, you shouldn’t. Hay Stack! Good riddance, Mil.” 

“He could be kind, when he felt like it,” Millie said, to be scrupulous about it. She found she didn’t mind Patrice calling her _Mil_ , though typically anyone changing something about Millie without her permission made her bite the inside of her mouth until it bled. _Mil_ out of Patrice’s mouth felt different — like the syllable turned into one of the stripes on her trousers and tessellated across her body into a thing that fit. 

“When he felt like it,” Patrice scoffed. “And when was that? Every other Sunday?”

“When he wanted to — you know.” 

Patrice raised her eyebrows at Millie. “You know?”

“You know,” Millie said, flushing furiously despite promising herself, after the first time, that she had nothing to be embarrassed about, that she was a worldly and intelligent woman who’d made a scientific decision. 

“I do know. I wasn’t sure that you did.”

“I’m thirty,” Millie pointed out. 

“And a Catholic.”

“For a given value of Catholic.” 

Patrice opened her eyes wide and then let her face crumple into a smile. “Scandalous words from Dr. Cloud.” 

“I am a doctor,” Millie agreed, pleased. “And you’re a lawyer.” 

“Not yet.”

“You’re going to be one.”

“Was he any good?” 

“Patrice.” 

“Was he?” 

“I — fine,” Millie said. “I’m not sure —”

“What?”

Millie didn’t know how to say it, to Patrice, in the public of this diner, though she’d learned some words in the past year that had begun to make things make sense to her. She wondered whether these words, or some friend of them, existed in Chippewa. She wasn’t sure she could bring herself to ask Zhaanat. It was a strange feeling; usually Millie asked anything she wanted to know the answer to, because it wasn’t like she had much to lose, and how else would she find out? But this felt different and more dangerous. Would Patrice know? Did Millie want to ask her? Patrice wasn’t Catholic, not the way Millie’s mother was; would that make a difference? “I’m not sure anything he did would have been that good. For me.”

“Ha,” said Patrice, flatly but with a straight razor edge of humor underneath. Millie felt a little burst of pleasure that she knew Patrice and could sometimes understand the modulations of her voice. “Unskilled — I could have guessed.”

“I don’t know,” said Millie, drawn again towards scrupulosity, even as she tried to stop up her own mouth. As usual, it didn’t work. “I don’t know that I — would have liked it. No matter how much skill he might have acquired.”

Patrice looked at Millie straight on, then. The light moved from her eyeglasses to the tender corner of her jaw. The tiny aperture in Millie’s heart fluttered open, as it usually did when she was alone with Patrice. She had never found a way to stop it. And no amount of Hay Stack’s tenderness could coax it open. After the proposal, he had told her she was frigid, to which Millie had said, “Isn’t that why I bought the Salisbury heater?” and then while he had choked over that, she had hightailed it out of his little Minneapolis living room. Now she was an old maid. But her heart didn’t feel like it belonged to an old maid. It felt young and new.

“I see,” said Patrice. She said it not like a judgment but like a fact. 

“Anyway, he wanted me to stop working,” Millie said, rushing to cover herself again after the waitress had brought them their plates of eggs and potatoes, which Millie as the more established career woman had determined she would pay for. “To do what? Cook his mother’s hotdish? What use is that to anybody? We’re trying to establish something at the university––and I think we could really do it, you know; I think we could.”

Patrice made the face she made when she was really interested in something, not pretending. That and the laugh: they were Millie’s favorites. “Do what?”

Millie leaned forward, feeling herself flush again, though this time she knew it was with excitement. “A department. A real department, on its own, not just scholars shoved into anthropology like an afterthought. American Indian Studies.” 

“You think it’s possible?” 

“Why not?” Millie said, though of course there were a thousand reasons why not. But everyone would say these things anyway. Nothing ever came to Millie easily; she was a doctor because she saw a thing she wanted and found a way to make it happen. She still served drinks at the Purple Parrot to keep herself afloat in her little room. “I don’t know how long it will take. But there are some other interested people at the university, people who think it’s worth doing.” 

“It is worth doing,” Patrice said, “of course it’s worth doing.” 

“That’s what I think, too,” Millie said, and ate a forkful of egg to calm down.

“I didn’t hate it, with Wood Mountain,” Patrice shared, later, conspiratorially, once their plates were empty and they were down to the dregs of their coffee.

“You — and Wood Mountain,” said Millie, so she didn’t say, _I knew it_ , which she determined would not be an appropriate response.

“But it wasn’t.” Patrice didn’t finish her sentence for a long time. “It wasn’t perfect.”

“Nothing’s perfect.” 

“But something might be better than imperfect.” 

“Yes,” Millie said, thinking of the nights she’d tried, in the last few months, heading over to the Dugout Lounge. She still didn’t know how to behave; with her bright red lipstick and trousers and her cat’s eye glasses, she was never dressed exactly how she should have been, somehow. But still she began to understand what it meant to look; to be seen in turn. To find the words. And still: “Some things are better than imperfect.” 

“You’re out of coffee,” Patrice said, reaching over to look in Millie’s coffee cup, catching with her palm Millie’s fingers, which were still threaded through the handle. “You want more?” 

Patrice looked at her again, with her level dark gaze. “Always,” said Millie, a little faint. Patrice smiled, and took the coffee cup.

**Author's Note:**

> the [Dugout Lounge](http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display?irn=10446635#transcript) was real. people like Millie created [UMN's department of American Indian Studies](https://cla.umn.edu/ais/about/history). the title comes from [an Ojibwe word](https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/main-entry/ininiikaazo-vai), and was informed by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's [As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance](https://rampages.us/goldstein/wp-content/uploads/sites/7807/2019/08/Leanne-Betasamosake-Simpson-As-We-Have-Always-Done_-Indigenous-Freedom-Through-Radical-Resistance.pdf).


End file.
